Cards on the table, gang: I’ve spent most of the last 18 months off my tits on painkillers. Not to a Jacko/Prince/stomach-pump degree, but enough to take the edge off my do-gooding and let evil have its way with the world. It’s no coincidence I was out of it when Brexit Brexitted and Trump trumped, when white supremacists showed their faces again, when Nazis rebranded and all manner of clusters were fucked. It’s been like Bane taking over Gotham after Batman got stuck down that well. As Edmund Burke once said, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to knacker their spines and chug handfuls of gabapentin.

But even in my diminished state I need to get back involved in the world, see through the grogginess and fog that surrounds me, ignore the 40-strong male choir in the corner and the unicorns firing rainbows out of their eyes. There’s do-gooding to be done-gooded. People, it’s time for a Zero-patented, guilt-ridden, non-Scientologist audit!

Onto veggieness. Even in the fog of my lost weekend I’ve not strayed from the righteous path of vegetarianism for the delicious path of actual flavour. I’ve not eaten a single piece of meat, fish or fowl, not even accidentally during one of those unfortunate overseas mix-ups I fucking live for. But I’ve got slack on checking beer and wine for isinglass because it’s a pain in the balls, and all my beloved painkillers will have been tested on animals and have often come in gelatine capsules. And while I’ve made a kind of peace with how the pharmaceutical industry rolls it’s a fractious, uneasy peace like you’d find between Star Wars trilogies. I also lean heavily on dairy, cramming eggs and cheese and milk into my facehole with no regard for how chickens and cows are treated once I’m done with them, knowing it’s unlikely to be gently. Maybe it’s time to take a couple more steps towards the living hell of veganism. On veggieness, let’s say eight Zero points and only a light flogging to my second-numbest finger.

Next, the big fat mess of global inequality, gender inequality, and the effects of big bidness and the rough end of capitalism. Here I’ve done embarrassingly little. I quit donating to Care International and Water Aid to redirect money elsewhere. It was to another charity but that does nothing to the mustard, let alone cut it. I’ve kept up with Kiva but feel no less conflicted about the ethics and usefulness of microfinance loans. I’ve smashed a bit of the patriarchy in working with perpetrators and survivors of domestic violence, but there’s still plenty of it in need of a smashing. Again, these things have become so embedded in my life and retreated so close to token gestures they no longer feel active with a capital A and an ism. Here I’m getting no Zero points, four thorough floggings and a half membership of the Young Conservatives. I need to do more. People, let’s make a start!

And yes, I had a failed comeback in January ‘14 where I did one entry and fucked off out of it. And yes, I had a second failed comeback in June ‘16 where I did two entries and fucked off out of it. But this will be different, this will be both lasting and meaningful, both gabba and pentin, and when next we meet I’ll turn my audit into goals, and goals into plans, and plans into revolution, and bit by bit we’ll edge this species towards basic decency. I will do this! I will do all of this and more! Or none of it, or less.

If you’ve been paying close attention to the worlds of politics, economics and horrific injustices, or if you’ve just been attempting to live in this country at this point in time under this particular government, you’ll have heard about this recession/depression/excuse to impose ideologically-driven cuts to services. The austerity programme that’s designed to turn the economy around while coincidentally satisfying many of the Tories’ ambitions on class warfare has seen some tremendous successes. Not economically, obviously – it’s a disaster by about every measure imaginable – but in screwing over poor people, vital services and basic hope. In our previous times together we’ve ranted about welfare cuts and how they’ll screw people, the bedroom tax and the little sense it makes and the rise of payday loans and the obvious exploitation they represent. For as long as there’s misery knocking about the rants will keep on coming.

Austerity isn’t working. Obviously it isn’t working. If it were working we’d see at least some sign of it working. What we’re seeing instead is sign after sign of it not working, and quote after quote from Cameron and Osborne saying they’ll stay the course as if we’re supposed to admire their stubbornness in the face of failure. This is two rich, privileged people screwing over the poor either because they want to or because they’re too afraid of saying “Oops”.

While the economy continues to do very little in the way of improving, one sector at least is thriving: food banks. This is what we’re resorting to to counter this assault on the poor. In Her Majesty’s United Kingdom of Great Britain and the British Isles and London, in one of the richest countries in the known world, in the age of iPads and botox, we have people begging at food banks to avoid starving to death or stealing to live. The Trussell Trust, which knows about these kinds of things, reckons there’s been a 76% rise in the number of food banks in the last year and a 170% rise in the numbers of people using them. They’re talking 346,992 people in the last year, just over a third of them children. Figures from 2009-10, from back before this government took over and started tearing strips off welfare, were at 40,898. That’s about a 750% increase in the lifetime of this government, this government that’s staying the course.

We should be ashamed of this. We should be ashamed we’re having to resort to this. We should be so angry about this we should be suffering losses of tens of millions of people to rage-related head explosions. We should be so embarrassed our collective blush should make the planets revolve around us thinking maybe we’re a new sun. And somewhere in there we should be maybe half proud people are putting these things together. Trussell, which likes a bit of Jesus but plays it down enough so’s you’d hardly know, reckons 30,000 donors and volunteers are helping out across the country, giving more than 3,400 tonnes of food last year. This is people seeing their communities struggling, pitching in as if poor people are fellow humans in need of a hand. It’s a decent thing they’re doing, even if it’s a lousy thing they’re being decent about, even if their decency shouldn’t be called on. And if Cameron tries to pass this off as The Big Society I’ll kick him square in the cock.

There’s a food bank opened up near us now, a couple minutes walk from social work. We had an email telling us how to use it when service users pitch up saying they’ve got no food for their children and no money to buy any. It’s getting harder to give them money now, with budgets getting tighter and destitution more in fashion thanks to the likes of the bedroom tax. Instead of getting money they’ll go to a needle exchange and ask for cans of beans so they don’t go hungry. It’s a new humiliation for people probably used to being humiliated.

Lousy as it is, it’s the Chazza of the Month. A few quid from me should buy a few cans of stuff; all non-perishable, though it won’t be lying around long. I’ll get a few cans of beans, a few cans of soup, maybe some pasta and some long-life milk. All veggie stuff, obviously. Shitty as this is I’m not above using it for a bit of social engineering.

Devoted as you are to yer man The Zero, and as closely as you monitor my good works, you’ll be aware I do the odd bit of fundraising in spite of hating it almost completely. The past few years I’ve been meddling with Yaknak Projects, a small charity set up by a few friends to run two children’s home in Nepal. They need £16,000 a year to keep the homes running, a delightful spot of constant pressure that cheers them greatly.

I had a plan to change how they fundraised, to reduce the effort and up the ambition a bit. First, I wanted to change the kind of events we took on and the kind of money we aimed for, going for fewer events but doing them on a bigger scale and making them repeatable year on year. Second, I wanted to up the amount brought in by regular donors, aiming towards the all-of-it mark. Third, I wanted to get some decent chunks out of grants and trusts if the first two parts of the plan didn’t cover us.

A couple of years ago we started stage one, rounding up friends, friends of friends, co-workers and co-workers’ friends to run a 10k or half marathon. We had a team of 13 aiming for about £4,000, a figure almost stupidly ambitious against what we’d had before. We got about £7,500 once we counted Gift Aid. I can’t even tell you the level of smugness I was walking around with. I’m talking Gwyneth Paltrow.

Last year we started stage two, the regular donors thing. In the world of fundraising, regular donations are the joy of joys. You ask someone for money once and they keep giving it to you month after month, and all you’ve got to do check your bank statements to see if they’ve stopped. Back before we started on this we were getting a couple of hundred a month from the trustees and a friend or two but mostly when we encouraged people to give regularly they responded by not doing that at all. We changed how we went about asking, talking up the idea of being a small band of dedicated noble types helping to keep this small charity going. People started giving and got us up to £8,500 a year, more than half our running costs. At that point, by comparison, Gwyneth was looking modest, full of doubt and insecurities.

Last year brought us down a Paltrow or two. Rerunning the runs we had a lot of people who said they’d be up for it didn’t bother. We ended up with fewer runners and a lot less cash, coming out with about £3,500; a top-five fundraiser but disappointing against the first year. And there’s no Plan B with this stuff, there’s no one writing cheques if we don’t bring in the cash. It’s just us.

This week I got started on the third, hopefully still annual, big fundraiser. Here we’re looking to get people running again but also figuring ways to get lazier types to do something they’re at least halfway up for. So far we’ve nicked the idea of feeding yourself for a pound a day from whichever charity thought it up first, and added the Daal Bhat Challenge where, like a native Nepali, you have to eat curry and rice three times a day for a week. The trick is now to find people who can be bothered doing this and get them to do it, and find people who can’t be bothered and see if we can get them to do it too. The trick is then to find people who want to give us money and have them give it to us, and find people who want to keep their money and see if we can take at least a little from them.

There’s a brutal bit of maths here. We need £7,500. If we set a realistic average of £150 sponsorship per entrant, excluding Gift Aid, we need about 40 people. They’d put us to £6,000, with Gift Aid taking us to £7,500. We’ve got four trustees plus me who have basically no choice about doing this, and four people who’ve already signed to triathlons and half marathons. That leaves us with 31 people to recruit. We’ve got 13 people from the past two years we can ask, some of whom might be interested. That leaves us with a minimum of 18 new people to find. And we’re not the Race for Life, we can’t go putting up posters on subways or adverts on TV. This is ambitious for us. This is pressure. This is an assload of consequences just waiting.

The thing with fundraising is you have to dress it up like it’s fun. You have to be all positive and win people over with charm and enthusiasm and flattery. I have to put aside the panic and the maths that keeps me awake. Trying to get money from people, I tell them how much good it’s going to do. What keeps me awake is the opposite of that. It’s the absence of their money and the bad things its absence will do. If we don’t bring in this cash what’ll happen is we don’t pay rent on the boys’ houses and we don’t buy them food. We take them out of school and out of the houses and put them back in the orphanages they were living in before, in the orphanages where 150 children cram in together. We will fail them completely. We need to get this money.

That whooshing noise you just heard was the sound of my sphincter closing shut.

As I’ve often said, I very much believe the children are our future. Teach them well, I’ve often said, and thereafter watch them lead the way. I also very much believe when the night falls the loneliness calls. And that you should give me one moment in time.

Look around the world of social work, you see how undereducation knackers people almost completely. How adults struggle with the basics of reading and writing, how they work shitty jobs or no jobs at all, how their confidence takes a dive, how they don’t value education because it did nothing for them, how they pass that on to their kids. Look around the world of the rest of the world, you’ll see how undereducation knackers everything almost completely and how male dickheads are stopping millions of girls getting an education. UNICEF agrees with me here, as it so often does, pointing to the links with child labour, sexual exploitation, the spread of HIV and AIDS, child mortality and other awfulnesses. Get girls into education, you grow educated women. That’ll be why the dickhead men aren’t so into it.

You’ll recall how Malala Yousafzai is a 15-year-old girl from the Swat District of Pakistan. Back in 2009, when she was 11 and the Taliban were banning girls’ education and blowing up their schools, she blogged for the BBC’s Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl under the pseudonym of Gul Makai. She wrote about how her dad’s school was slowly emptying, how her English teacher couldn’t make it in because of a curfew, how she got death threats on the way home. Clever as she was, brave as she was, she gave up her anonymity to feature in Adam Ellick and Irfan Ashraf’s documentary, Class Dismissed, which, you should be warned, includes shots of corpses left in the streets after the Taliban was done with them. Malala did a few interviews speaking out against the Taliban’s repression, got known for it, and in October 2011 was nominated for the Children’s Peace Prize. In October 2012, as she sat on her school bus after finishing an exam, she was shot in the head by some Taliban prick. Their spokesman called her activism “a new chapter of obscenity” and threatened the media for its unsympathetic accounts of their attempted assassination of a schoolgirl because what they lack in humanity they also lack in self-awareness.

Malala survived. The single bullet passed through her head and neck and stopped in her shoulder, not far from her spine. She was in a coma for days, passing through hospitals in Pakistan on her way to a specialist place in England. She regained consciousness after her arrival there and started her long recovery. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and last month returned to education, starting her GCSEs in a school in Birmingham on her way to becoming a doctor and/or politician. She is so many kinds of awesome you can’t keep count of it all.

In her honour, and working with her and her family, Vital Voices Global Partnership set up the Malala Fund to campaign for and enable girls’ education. In April, Malala announced the fund’s first grant, paying for the education of 40 girls in the Swat Valley. It was, she said, the happiest moment of her life. I assume being named as the Chazza of the Month bumps it to second place. Like she says in that video up there, “Let us turn the education of 40 girls into 40 million girls”. You can help her with that by donating to the fund as close to immediately as you can manage.

When last we met I was banging on about stag nights and homophobic banter, the two intertwined more closely than David Cameron’s tongue and the devil’s dirty bumhole. There was a lot of it kicking about and much of it incredibly immature. I never would have believed the word ‘gaylord’ was still in use, or that if it was it would be used so often, or that if it was and was being used often it would be by full-grown adults, or that if it was and they were they’d be using it on a non-ironic basis. But that’s the thing with homophobia: It’s basically everywhere.

At the stag it was on the level of supposedly non-homophobic name calling, where people make out it’s not homophobia at all, where objects or concepts are gay if you don’t like them, where people are fags if you think they’re stupid, where homosexuality is a byword for badness. Morons like this. Chris Moyles liked this, spreading his family-friendly homophobia to millions of listeners because he’s a cock. That earned him Stonewall’s Bully of the Year award. Like they said, ‘Chris Moyles is not helping young LGBT people struggling to come out through his comments’. But it’s not just charmless ex-DJs who indulge in this shit. A teacher in Mrs Zero’s old school used to call stuff gay to sound down with the kids. The straight kids. Presumably the gay kids and the bisexual kids and the kids who hadn’t quite figured themselves out were less keen to get down with him on account of him being an arsehole.

If you know anything about wedges you’ll recognise that as the thin end of one, the other end being homophobic threats, homophobic violence and vandalism, homophobic murder, homophobic politics, religions and laws backed up by a homophobic media. Back in 2008, Stonewall, the campaigning charity that looks to even things up a bit, ran a survey of homophobic crimes in the UK. It reckoned one in five lesbians and gay men had been on the receiving end of a homophobic incident or hate crime in the preceding three years, that one in six of these incidents involved physical assault, that one in eight involved unwanted sexual contact. Occasionally these things make the headlines. There was the guy in Edinburgh beaten by four men and a woman. There were the two men in Coventry punched in the face and kicked in the chest because one of them looked wrong to their attacker. There was Stuart Walker, murdered. And although the world seems to be getting its shit together and it seems like every generation looks back at the last thinking it was in the stone age, the Stonewall survey found people aged 18-24 were far more likely to be abused and harassed than were old people, and that young men seemed to be the most common perpetrators. As level as society’s getting – which isn’t very – it’s headed wrong here.

A look around the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill tells you how the world’s working, people talking about ‘gay marriage’ as opposed to ‘marriage equality’ like people are asking for something special as opposed to what the straight part of the world’s always had. Without the bill, straight people getting married is like people playing golf in a country club that doesn’t allow Jews. A look at the bill’s debate tells you everything you need to know about the people working to keep it that way. People like David Burrowes who reckons “the state is trying to divide and rule the meaning of marriage”. People like Ian Paisley who reckons marriage equality is killing heterosexual marriages in Spain and Portugal. People like Tony Baldry, who chipped in some wisdom from Christianity and Islam to say how much the idea sucked. People like Roger Gale, who reckoned the bill was almost Orwellian, that same-sex marriage had the whiff of Alice in Wonderland about it and who made a helpful reference to incest. Twats, all of them. The bill got through, obviously, and progress is on its way. But these poisonous people still think these poisonous things, and millions of poisonous people agree with them.

We need a Chazza of the Month that’s going to fix all this. A charity that campaigns for equality in law, that points to inequalities in politics and the media, a charity that works in schools to help gay and lesbian kids with what they’re going through and shouldn’t be, that tells other kids to not be assholes, that will make stag nights of the future halfway bearable for people who aren’t galactic twats. I’m thinking maybe Stonewall. They take money right here.

One thing I’ll tell you: No one gets into social work for the laughs. I’m in about seven months now and it’s been a relentless parade of misery and awfulness, a daily dose of systemic dickery and individual flaws and failure. It’s been punctuated by the occasional bit of progress and improvement, the odd bit of reason to think sometimes it works. I think maybe you have to be in a long time to get enough success to keep you going, to feel you’ve made enough of a difference often enough it counters all the times people charge into their miseries and all you can do is write about it. I sound a little down on social work, and on life. A week-long child protection course will do that to you.

The past four days I’ve been holed up in a training centre, me and 14 other newbies too fresh to be cynical, too new to shrug anything off easily. Professional detachment protects people. We haven’t got it figured yet. We’ve spent four days talking over cases of child abuse. Talking over kids beaten and burned and tortured and poisoned, kids unwashed and hungry, kids seeing the world with adult eyes, seeing their parents drunk and high. Kids touched where they shouldn’t be, kids made to touch people where they shouldn’t, kids raped and told to keep quiet. We’ve been talking these lives over, feeling shitty about them. They’ve been living them; we’ve been feeling extra shitty, like it’s not our place to feel anything, like our sympathy’s an indulgence.

Today we worked through a stack of serious case reviews, cases where children died and workers didn’t see enough to see it coming or do enough to stop it happening. Peter Connolly, murdered at 17 months. Kennedy McFarlane, killed at three years old, drugged and beaten by her mum’s boyfriend. Caleb Ness, killed at 11 weeks, tiny and so thoroughly helpless you can’t figure it fully, his life so short, his tragedy so huge you can’t find its edges. Victoria Climbié, burned and beaten, chained and tortured and killed at 8 years old, let down so completely we should be ashamed for about the next thousand generations.

Get through tomorrow, I’ll take on these cases myself. It’s work I want to do. It’s mildly terrifying. 65 million people in the country, all behind closed doors, all with their curtains drawn, all working to keep their secrets. Children scattered over the country, scared and living with God knows what. Me with my questions. Me trying to find where the truth is.

We need as many eyes as possible, as many routes to the truth as possible, as many routes out for as many children as possible. The NSPCC’s the Chazza of the Month. They keep Childline going, taking 650,000 calls and online contacts last year. They run the Parents Under Pressure programme, getting in about children whose parents use drugs or alcohol, working to keep the danger from them. They run Minding the Baby, making weekly visits to babies born to young and vulnerable parents, kids themselves who haven’t got enough figured to know how not to do harm. They’re campaigning their assess off for children’s rights and researching their assess off to find better ways of doing things. They’ve got a ton of work going. A bit of cash their way will help.

Hell of a week. The lunches have been good. They did soup on Monday. It was cold outside.

And so, with 2012 behind us and the Mayans looking like some sort of primitive culture that didn’t have everything figured out and their modern-day followers looking like some sort of bucketload of twats, one’s attention naturally turns to one’s achievements across the year and to the resolutions rushed out in the interests of filling a page.

And then there was the small matter of my new year’s resolutions, a cluster of low-rent ambitions so hastily cobbled together and even more hastily forgotten about that this paragraph’s about to get very embarrassing. First, I vowed to become a better vegetarian, something I achieved on a rather half-assed level. My left bum cheek bought some multi-vitamins to plug the gaps in my otherwise lousy diet, started snacking on nuts and seeds to actually get some protein down my neck, and cooked one or two meals using actual ingredients rather than just slinging some ready-made, mutant-looking, meat-free sludge in the oven. It’s been an okay start, the bonus being I can use the same resolution again this year. Second, I aimed to give more to charity, looking to reach about ten percent of my take-home pay once I’d battered through my colossal student debt. I’ve made similar progress there, my right bum cheek bumping up my donations to about six percent which isn’t bad considering the remaining colossalness of my colossal student debt. Third, I promised to buy the most environmentally friendly car I could manage once my old car died completely. It did, obviously, and I did an okay job of getting a half-decent replacement. I couldn’t afford anything in the way of an electric or hybrid car but I got a diesel with lower emissions that’s so far saved a couple thousand kilograms of carbon dioxide being spewed into Al Gore’s sensitive lungs. That’s a solid bit of resolutioning, that is. And fourth, I vowed to switch to an electricity supplier trading only in renewable energy. That hasn’t happened, what with the forgetting all about it and then the remembering about it but realising I couldn’t afford it yet. I’m all for paying a bit more to save the world but it’s had to be bumped to the post-debt era in what even my most loyal supporters are calling a humiliating failure of Lib Dem proportions. Still, that new set of resolutions are writing themselves, aren’t they?

So for 2013 we’ll start with the better vegetarian thing, actually learning what’s to be done with the likes of tofu, lentils, vegetables and my kitchen and turning them into edible meals. Add to that a working knowledge of yer basic nutrition and a hefty increase in protein and smugness and that’ll be me sorted. Next, the electricity thing. What with us having to be the change we wish to see in the world I’ll sign up for a more expensive but beautifully clean supplier that uses only wind, water, sunshine or human spinal fluid to power the many spy cameras I have placed around Al Gore’s bedroom. Third, the charity thing. I need to restart regular donations to the likes of Care International and WaterAid on my way to the ten percent target, showing how atheism rolls with the tithing. And fourth, I’ll aim to do my job well. That shouldn’t take a resolution but it’s easy to get worn down quickly in social work, easy to turn to them-and-us thinking, easy to drift to the right. It’s easy to forget people are products of their environments, easy to get frustrated with their inability to change, easier to blame people than the environments that made them and the systems that keep them in place. I’ll aim to keep my lefty principles intact, keep up with research to make sure what I’m doing works, and be as awesome as it’s possible to be.

I will do this. I will do all of this. In November, when I remember I wrote this whole bastard of a thing.

Generally I prefer not to write about current scandals and upsets, I prefer not to jump on media bandwagons or scrap around in tabloid hubbubs. Go too far in that direction you’ll find yourself with a site people think of as relevant, topical and interesting. But these past few weeks, with the death of Jacinta Saldanha, I’ve had suicide on my mind.

You’ll be aware how a while back a couple members of a family with a flimsy claim to an anachronistic position of limited power and unlimited privilege announced they’re expecting a baby. And how millions of nosey people with nothing in the way of class consciousness were interested. And how the media went berserk with nothing articles about how the future-sprog will one day wear the world’s most expensive hat while the rest of us go about our business. And how a couple of lame-ass DJs made a lame-ass prank call to remind us how prank calls stopped being funny about two minutes before Alexander Graham Bell was born. And how one of the nurses they called gave out a bit of information she shouldn’t have and justified the existence of every Data Protection Officer the world over and their end-of-days lecturing in every organisation everywhere. And how one of the nurses killed herself, and how the world stopped for a second and shook its head.

What does this tell us about the role of the media? About its obsession with the royal family? About prank calls and ratings-grabs and that time we upset Andrew Sachs? Nothing. It tells us nothing we didn’t know already. It’s what it tells us about life and mental health and suicide that matters. It tells us how life hangs by the thinnest of threads and how life is a pair of scissors ready to cut itself to fuck.

Suicide’s a big killer of people. The Samaritans reckon a million people around the world die every year by suicide, with more than 5,000 in the UK. That’s enough to touch most of us. I know people who’ve tried to kill themselves and I’ve known people who’ve managed it and I know people who’ve lost people. And it’s an awful shitfest of tragicness, with all the grief that comes with losing someone with added layers of guilt and failure and lost opportunities and embarrassment and feeling looked at and judged. There are reasons for suicide; mostly not the ones we imagine afterwards. Like The Samaritans say, it’s a complicated thing. It’s not often the result of a single problem, more a bunch of problems bound together. There are problems that seem unmanageable and unhappiness that seems intolerable and maybe is. But suicide’s a permanent solution to a temporary set of problems, and it seems survivors are mostly glad to find themselves alive, glad they survived the decision they made. And it’s around the decision point, when someone’s giving it serious thought, us Zeroes can get stuck in and be all awesome and life saving and that.

Like yer regular first aid, which helps save lives and fill blog entries, we have mental health first aid that teaches the art of suicide intervention. I did a course on this a few years back and a refresher a few weeks back and have had to use it once or twice. I’d be linking all over the place here so you could look into it yourself but it seems the companies who run the training would rather get paid than give out their ideas for free. This, then, comes from a memory known for being fairly lousy:

First, we have to be on the lookout for people who seem down or distant or maybe different to how they seem usually. We have to have a conversation, using a spot of tact and subtlety, to find how lousy they’re feeling. We have to ask a hard question and we have to use the S word: “Are you thinking of suicide?” Anything less than that leaves us and them open to misinterpretation. We have to ask their reasons for wanting to die, respect them and not be afraid to talk about them, not jump in with how wrong they are. We have to ask their reasons for staying alive, figuring most people aren’t a hundred percent sold on the idea of dying. We have to bring those reasons out and big them up. We have to get an idea of their plan, if they’re thinking vaguely about not being around any more or if they’ve bought tablets ready to swallow or picked out the bridge they’re going from. We have to disrupt the plan with them, agree to get shot of the tablets or find a way to resist the temptation of the bridge if only for a few days. We have to get them to help that knows what it’s doing like we’d get someone to a hospital after they collapse, and we have to follow up and see how they’re doing once the crisis is over.

There are people thinking about suicide. It’s on us to find them and help them. In the meantime, The Samaritans are the Chazza of the Month. Christmas is a rough time for some people, and a bit of your money will give them someone to talk to.

You’ll have noticed I have a kind of love/hate relationship with fundraising, a relationship typified more by hate than by love on account of how I can’t fucking stand it. I can’t stand it on two counts: first, because I want you to give me your money without having to do anything for it; and second, because it brings out the inner twat in otherwise tedious people.

Ten years into fundraising I’ve run out of ideas. I ran out of ideas two years into fundraising, the last eight being a mash up of frustration, repetition and boredom. Quite why I have to entertain, amaze or otherwise dazzle people into giving me money when everyone knows the world is screwed in seventeen different directions is a mystery and injustice second only in size to the repeated casting of Madonna in otherwise professional feature films. I shouldn’t have to tap dance on an alligator’s left tit to remind you how people are starving in the world or promise you a nice day’s skydiving to get you off your arse. Fundraising should require nothing more than me standing in the street with a sandwich board saying “Seriously, though” and people dropping wads of cash into a skip in an acknowledgement of how other people need it more.

And then there’s the twat factor. Here we have Steve from Accounts getting his legs waxed because he’s ker-azy. Here we have Sandra from HR wearing deely boppers for 24 consecutive hours because she’s mad, her. Here we have Nicholas Witchell doing the can can for the 18th consecutive year because he’s Pudsey’s bitch. It’s why I was embarrassed by thoseruns the past couple of years in spite of the ten grand they brought in and it’s why I’m currently sick of testosterone-fuelled pube wranglers banging on about Movember. Even though I’m doing it, having caved in to what was a pretty minor bit of office-based peer pressure.

Movember, you’ll recall, is an annual fundraiser and awareness raiser for testicular and prostate cancer. It started in Australia in 2004 with a handful of men growing a few facefuls of moustaches to raise a few quid for men’s health charities. It’s absolutely raced away in the eight years since, hitting America, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Spain and the UK. Here we have a full on proper Butterfly, a small idea taking off and doing a substantial amount of goodery.

It’s a blokey bit of gimmickry that amounts to the facial hair equivalent of dick measuring, but it’s a necessary bit of gimmickry being as how men are often quite stupid about looking after their health, particularly if it’s in or around the toilet area. Movember is a big manly bit of manliness that gets in about the macho posturing that stops men getting checked. And they should get checked, on account of how many people are dying. NHS Choices reckons 36,000 men get hit with prostate cancer every year, accounting for a quarter of all male cancer diagnoses. 10,000 men die every year as a result. And yet, says the NHS, it can be cured if it’s caught and treated in the early stages. Likewise testicular cancer. It’s less common, with just over 2,000 diagnoses a year, but it too can be treated when caught early. And survival rates are way up there, kicking about the 95 percent area. The problem, of course, is that these particular cancers are not always caught early because they’re found in the balls and via the bumhole and some men aren’t up for doctors poking around their bits. That’s a shame because their embarrassment is killing them in a grotesque demonstration of Darwinian theory. That’s what Movember is looking to change.

In spite of my cynicism and other people’s twattishness it’s a cracking fundraiser, Movember’s official site reckoning it’s raised £184 million since its launch. The pace is gathering, with last year’s efforts accounting for near enough £80 million. Money raised in the UK goes to Prostate Cancer UK, the Institute for Cancer Research and awareness raising bits and pieces to get men to get themselves checked. And it’s a cracking awareness raiser. You’d be amazed these past few weeks how many conversations I’ve had with my coworkers about the quality and condition of their testicles. Way more than usual. Whether that translates to them going home and feeling up their balls for lumps is harder to say, even with the powerful zoom lens I have on my camera, but at least it’s being talked about. Movember’s the Chazza of the Month. You can donate right here and see about saving some of those 10,000 embarrassed Darwinites.

So there I was, all ready to announce Kiva as the Chazza of the Month for a second non-consecutive time when what should appear but a classic spot of Zero angst?

You’ll recall how Kiva is a microfinance outfit offering loans to people in developing countries and how I’ve bigged them up a couple of times already. So far I’ve loaned to Rosaura Tuñoque Santisteban’s general store in Peru, the Santa Lucia Group’s clothing business in Nicaragua, the Kunthea Hun Village Bank Group’s vegetable plot in Cambodia, Malikie Kanu’s food store in Sierra Leone, Luka Ngoti Hahunyu’s car repair place in Kenya and Rose’s egg, water and milk shop in Rwanda, and felt pretty good about my noble self doing it. The loans have all been returned to me now, like a boomerang of justice flung by an aborigine of morality round a kangaroo of reversible poverty, in a metaphor so strained it’s got a hefty case of haemorrhoids. Point is, I’ve got money waiting to go back out into the world and do good.

That’s about where the wobble kicked in. After that last rant about payday lenders being arseholes the worries I’ve had about microfinance went from being vague floaty things at the back of my mind to being slightly less vague, marginally firmer things on a list of other things to consider thinking about at some point in time when I can be bothered. There are two worries at work here: the interest people are expected to pay, and whether the loans actually do any long-term, world-improving, future-fixing good.

Like the likes of Wonga, the fees and interest on these things can be fairly hefty. Kiva reckons high interest is in the bones of microfinance, that it’s needed to cover the costs of making small loans. There’s a degree of sense in that, and a spot of maths that adds up to something halfway convincing. Kiva says sorting a loan of $100 costs about the same as a loan of $500 but the transactional costs come off as disproportionate for the hundred bucks. A hypothetical $30 charge would show as 6 percent for the $500 borrower but 30 percent for the $100 borrower.

Thing is, the examples Kiva gives are only hypothetical and then vague on top of that, making them less transparent than the arseholes I was banging on about last week. I can’t find how much people actually pay back for the money they borrow. Dig into repayment schedules, they only total the amount loaned with no mention of the interest. This matters. If Kiva and the Wonga-likes have the same basic business model it feels like a cheat to say one’s a big hearted doer of good and the other’s a lousy, exploitative bag of bastards. And adding to this you’ve got Wonga supporting Kiva, slapping the logo on its website like they’re arseholes in a pod. Serenity now!

The closest I can get to resolving the interest thing is going through CARE International which does its own microfinance via Lend With Care. It says affiliated Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) typically charge between 20 percent and 30 percent interest which, if true of Kiva’s MFIs, would make their hypothetical 30 percent at least less hypothetical if no less vague. And if we’re talking highs of 30 percent we’re far enough from Wonga’s trillion percent to relax a little about the interest.

Next up is the worry about whether the loans actually do any good. Here we wade into economic and development theory so complicated it makes my bumhole sting. Some say it’s cool, others say it’s not. I’ve simplified their positions slightly. That aside there’s basic logic that says if someone’s getting a loan to buy stock for their shop, and that shop’s not new, and they’re not looking to expand but just to fill shelves, then the shop’s not making the money it should and maybe a loan won’t help that much. But, again, there’s not much in the way of detail so maybe these are always new businesses or always businesses looking to expand.

Maybe it comes down to trust. I’m not a fan of that kind of thing, not since I lent that hobo my car so he could take his sick dog to its audition at the circus, their own car having been stolen by a friend of Douglas Hurd. They said they’d only need it for an afternoon. It’s been twelve years. But I trust CARE International and Kiva gets top marks from Charity Navigator, so maybe trust will have to do.

As for Kiva’s affiliation with Wonga, I’m willing to write that off as just the kind of bad-taste blowjob charities have to give corporations to stay funded and Kiva’s not unique in that. The charity I used to work for once took money from Nestlé in a corporate blowie so distasteful I downed two bottles of Listerine and still had an aftertaste of dead babies.

Main thing is there’s only about 90 minutes of October left and I need my bed. By which I mean congratulations to Kiva, the official, undisputed Chazza of the Month.